Joseph Stella 1877-1946

Joseph Stella’s artistic career defies easy categorization. He was simultaneously a modernist and traditionalist, a dual citizen of the Old and New World, a bold experimenter and masterful practitioner of time-honored artistic techniques. His iconic paintings of New York City, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, celebrate modernity and the Machine Age, while his exuberant paintings of the natural world speak to the spiritual revelation that guided and grounded him throughout his life. Until recently, the divergent aspects of Stella’s career “confounded his legacy.” But in Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, the multi-venue museum exhibition that focused on the artist’s lifelong engagement with nature, a more complete and nuanced understanding of his career has emerged.

Stella’s work of flora and fauna demonstrate his deep connection to and close observational study of nature to invigorate his creativity and sustain his human spirit. Indeed, nature was a salve to his woes about life and the modern age. He made countless drawings and paintings of flowers, exploring new styles and pressing the limits of his imagination. Like nature itself, he was always changing, always growing.

After a sustained exploration of the urban sites in New York City in such iconic paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, Stella painted the Tree of My Life in 1919 and ushered in a new era of his artistic development. Although he painted the masterwork from his studio in Brooklyn, it draws from his rich memories of Italy -- lush verdant hills, flora and fauna abound. The chaotic plethora of natural forms are reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch, as Barbara Haskell points out in her explication of the painting. The deep spirituality of the work also speaks to Stella’s complicated relationship to Catholicism and paganism that he would explore in greater detail upon his return to Italy in 1922.

The variations on theme that Stella developed from the Tree of My Life would become the hallmark of his oeuvre, as Stephanie Meyer Heydt writes in Visionary Nature. Many of the plants, flowers and animals that he paints in Tree of My Life would become the staple of his visual vocabulary. “Crotons, lilies, cranes, songbirds, swans, herons, each take center stage in later works.” For some motifs, Stella repeats the form, as he did repeatedly with the Brooklyn Bridge. The white heron that stands tall in the Tree of My Life reappears in Purissima (1927), Apotheosis of the Rose (1926), and two near identical paintings titled The White Heron of 1918-1920 and The Heron of 1925. Heydt writes, both heron paintings feature “the majestic white bird situated among lilies, songbirds, and the imaginative form of a conical flower, and winding flowering gourd. Yet in one, sinuous stalks of tall lotus flowers grace the right portion of the composition, while in the other, tall tropical leaves stand in the same place, as if Stella was working through a compositional question.”

In order to better understand the reappearance of The Heron in 1925 it’s important to provide additional biographical and artistic context. In 1922 Stella returned to Italy for the second time and embarked on one of the most creative and significant periods of his career. Stylistically and thematically, he built on the ideas that were born out of the Tree of My Life, but being back in Italy used the landscape, history, spirituality and personal experience of place to greater effect. Stella looked back to the sinuous shapes and pastel palette of such early Italian Renaissance painters as Piero della Francesco and Giotto as inspiration and further developed the unique style that combined these influences with his own prodigious skill and artistic vision. Taking the resplendent natural beauty of southern Italy and Catholic iconography as his principal subjects, Stella created a vibrant imaginary world of blue sea and sky, inhabited by the same mystical birds and flowers that populated the Tree of My Life. He revisits The Heron while he’s in Italy, and in this iteration heightens the blue background and opens up the expanse of sky, as if the sky and sea meet in a luminous horizon. He changes the color of some of the flowers to better reflect the pastel palette that dominated this body of work. The resultant painting is glorious, making it one of the most important works from this period. Magnificent in color and scale, The Heron captures the “mystical rapture” that seized Stella upon his return to his beloved Italy. These works acted as devotional shrines for Stella, combining his reverence for nature with the Catholic folklore that permeated southern Italian culture. He would continue to take the natural world as his subject for the rest of his career, but the works from this period are singular in modern American art for their originality, exceptional beauty, and deep personal resonance for the artist.